The author discussed motion blur in the real world and that the eye was designed for the real world. But didn't discuss computer generated imagery, which doesn't generally have motion blur (yet), and the benefits of high update rate. The eye, retina, visual cortex system has extensive special purpose motion processing systems, only poorly understood so far. The eye system is highly optimized for processing motion and using the blur on the retina as part of the interpretation of motion.
On the other hand, many display devices generate pulses of light that do not create blur on the retina under motion, either object motion or head/eye motion. This pulsed train impressed on the retina fools the eye system motion sensors.
The most common way to see this is to look at an LED clock or other LED display in a dim room. Ever notice that as you move your head, the display appears to swim in space? That's because the pulses of light from the scanned LED's create a sequence of still images on the retina while the surround creates a continuous blurred images. The two scenes get processed for motion differently and so appear to swim with respect to each other. This same effect occurs with CRT's in similar conditions.
Increase the refresh rate, and the pulsed light images get closer together and better approximate motion blur.
Note that this effect has nothing to do with flicker sensitivity or flicker fusion frequency.
I have no idea how Quake performance differs between 70 and 200 Hz refresh but I can see that it might.
How much will Cobalt stock be worth?
on
Sun Buys Cobalt
·
· Score: 1
Several factors combined to kill it for now.
1. lots of marketing claims on performance and availablity that didn't hold up
2. not very robust, certain images creates visible artifacts. The algorithm needed more work and less marketing
3. highly proprietary implementation prevented more people from playing with it or improving it.
4. complex and difficult mathematics not taught very many places limited the ability to incorporate into custom hardware
5. did I mention the heavy BS factor?
You're either naive, joking, or trolling. Organizations in power attempt to increase their power and decrease instances on imperfect control. Their limits come from law, lack of information, and resistance. The Net has increased the amount of information available, The laws clearly haven't responded to the rapidly changing technology. We're left with resistance.
Assuming US democracy works, and it has in the past, once a few fat cat kids get in trouble or a few sympathetic people get creamed by the new corporate power grabbers, the public will get outraged and polititans will explain how they've _always_ supported free this and that. But, it's possible that other forms of resistance will become necessary. Certainly, preserving the right to hold private conversations and the right to publish anonymously becomes essential to resisting the natural tendancy of power to attempt to increase it's hold.
The entire principle of government rests on balancing power and interests. How did you ever get the idea that yeilding all power results in a stable situation?
1. Recent studies show that electric fields might cause problems but probably not magnetic fields. The effect probably comes from static buildup creating new molecules that poison us rather than directly from the field. As an aside, _don't_ use a monitor that crackles when you put your hand on the face, because it tears apart the various plastic and cleaning fluid vapor molecules and creates all kind of junk.
2. No one needs a lead jock strap bacause the only claimed effect is cancer statistics not sterility.
3.Not all radiation is the same by about 10^30
5. Lead has nothing to do with magnetism...lead's for particles and gamma rays. Shield magnetic fields with Mu metal. It's soft iron or nickel, kind of looks like thick tin foil
6. We had the flicker problem in a old 1860's textile mill building I worked in, lots of bad wiring. Solution, simply change the monitor scan rate to 60 Hz. Some people will perceive flicker, try telling them they're imagining it. Dimming the lights and monitor brightness helps, because the eye has much better flicker sensitivity at high brightness.
Am I the only one that thinks the Guidescope thing is dangerous? They get a message about every site you hit. Do you really trust that their privacy policy as stated today will remain the same? Do you really want a central clearing house with records of your web history subject to subpoena in a lawsuit?
Junkbuster and most of the other suggestions here blocks the stuff you don't want at your own computer, without sending out any info.
Also, how does Guidescope intend to make money? Maybe the Opt-In thing will provide enough revenue because the database has more value to advertisers, but you have to visit their site again to get your ads.
The whole thing feels very strange. I suspect it's an advertising/marketing thing to lull users into a false sense of security.
The crypto world invented steganography in order to hide the use of crypto (It buries the data bits in a large audio or image file). It sounds like the IPsec people would find users if they provided a variant on freeswan that hid the setup and data packets.
VPN data packets just look like random data inside the IP packet. But maybe the firewall/router/anticompetitive device can look for the setup messages, or detect use of certain ports? This is sad. It used to be that worst case firewall's came from big company network security engineers. This is a whole new class of annoying. Now the world will need an undetectable vpn setup protocol.
VPN usually means creating an encrypted IP in IP tunnel, for example between home and office, to allow secure connections. So, we have a difference of interpretation here that hard to understand. cwilson assumes it means creating a home network, probably with ipmasquerading. But I've never seen "VPN" used in that context. On the other hand, what does it mean for @home to forbid encrypted tunnels. Do they mean you can't encrypt? What about SSL? Do they mean you can't create a site that allows others to VPN in from the internet? Mysterious.
E-beam lithography is what they used to create the mask. They they used anisotropic etching to further control channel size to less than lithographic feature size (a very common technique). Read up on the technology a bit. Maybe you're thinking of Ion Implant technology where the process actually implants the doping atoms without lithography?
Current generation fab plants cost about $6B to build with that increasing about 50% per generation of technology, which takes about 18 months. These fab plants currently use ultraviolet light to expose a whole IC in one step. What IBM is proposing will require drawing each feature with electron beams...a very time consuming process when an IC contains 300 million little lines...making an IC built with technology about 300M time more expensive than current UV lithography....suitable for special single transistors and research into quantum effects but Not Ready for Prime Time(tm). Eventually the industry will develop electron beam or x-ray resists to make IC's with this density but Moore's law holds both ways, as a predictor on advancement and as a predictor of limits on what's possible.
Timely topic...The Corel Linux words on the box turned OFF my office mate. He's just bought a new high end PC and is looking around for a Linux distro to install. He's hardware engineer, power NT usr, Unix in college, and according to him, "It's time." His impression was the words focused on Corel and not enough on what's in the box...too much on install tools and not enough on the list of software. He liked SuSe because it listed the key packages.
Actually, switching speed is becomming less and less important in chip design. Today's technology, 0.25 micron feature size and smaller has pushed line widths down and die size up to the point that it takes more than one clock cycle to move a signal from one side of the die to another...because the fine lines have a lot of resistance and silicon has a lot of capacitance. Which explains the push for copper interconnects (Intel's Coppermine CPU, and others), copper has less resistance than Aluminum. This speed limit is so significant that it drives CPU architecture towards the Itanium (wide instruction word) and Transmeta Crusoe (software scheduling) and away from superscalar/multiscalar, all because it's to difficult too design hardware that coordinates pipeline stalls all over the die.
How in the world did this paranoid delusion (old term for troll) get Score: 2???? The facts are that commercial technology is moving faster than state sponsored technology...as you might imagine for anything run by bureaucrats. For example, in the mid 80's, the Dept of Defense thought it needed to sponsor Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC). The initial briefings talked about achieving 25 MHz and calling all such chips "munitions" and forbidding their export as a threat to national security. But as usual for DoD projects that try to compete with commercial, Intel had 100 MHz Pentiums before VHSIC had much more than some toy bus interface chips. Pentiums easily met the munition standard.
The BLAST algorithm mentioned in the start of this thread does significantly better that dual polarized links. BLAST allows the transmitter power to drop in half when using two antennas (same _total_ power as number of antennas increase). Try this with separate dual polarized links, the S/N drops and the Shannon limit drops _exactly_ in half...resulting in the same net throughput. The magic of BLAST is that the data rate _grows_ linearly with number of antennas while keeping total power constant.
Shannon's formula _does_ exactly explain why 56K modems are the limit. Telco samples the phone line at 8 kHz and 8 bits per sample (64k bit rate). It's the fact that the analog line is quantized to 8 bits that determines the signal to noise ratio (about 6 dB per bit=48 dB). Given that amount of noise, no modem designer can invent a signaling structure that gets more bits per symbol. What you say is also true, given an optimum signaling structure...the digital trunks will only carry 64K less overhead.
Claude Shannon develop a relationship between capacity and bandwidth ("the Shannon Limit") that has held for 40-50 years. That's (mostly) why modems topped out at 56K.
But here's some brilliant work that supports 10X better for wireless links http://www.bell-labs.com/project/blast/
"Spacial Reuse" says that capacity is effectively unlimited. In other words, if you need more capacity, make the cell sizes smaller.
Lineo is a distribution with value added and customer support. I doubt that Transmeta want's to get into the Linux distribution business...after all even Linus doesn't do distributions, just kernels. Mobile linux is more of a feasibility demonstration/test platform/marketing warm and fuzzy for the processor...and a great test program for the processor.
Y'all have been talking about algorithms, math,etc. But a quick look at the guys page clearly shows the focus on design for VLSI implementation. He doesn't need to patent math...he's patenting the circuit.
More and more of the economy now assumes a sustained exponential growth of IC based products. When the growth rate begins to slow, it WILL create significant disruption. A number of points: First the rate of growth WILL slow sometime, maybe caused by fundamental process limits, maybe by increasing costs associated with the capital equipment to manufacture the stuff, or maybe because it becomes to large a percentage of the GNP (saturation).
IC manufacture is capital intensive. Someone told me that an Intel fab plant runs $5-8B today and doubles every generation. Wall Street is pumping money into Silicon because of growth. When growth slows or stops is will have an enormous impact on investment flow. Then the lack of investment will slow progress, slowing the need for development. It's all interrelated, coupled and highly amplified by the exponent of Moore's Law.
When it slows, the whole attitude about products will shift. Today, if you want a really good sewing machine or small lathe you get a good used one built 1930-1950. When Moore's law times out, the investment in plants will slow to a trickle. Fab equipment will wear out. Student will avoid the dying industry. (What's the Silicon version of rust belt?) People won't buy a new computer because it's not as good as the old one. Software development will begin to focus on quality and then crash as the market saturates (no need to buy new SW once it works and you have to run on the same old machine.
When today's Moore's law based economy crashes it will create massive dislocations. Imagine Silicon Valley with a New England mill town look, or Pittsburg/Buffalo/Cleveland circa 1970.
When the Unix culture formed, it consisted of a bunch of terminals in a room. When you had a question, somebody in the room had just a bit more experience (20 minutes is enough) and could help. I'm old enough to remember the culture. That's why man pages exist in the form they do. Someone told you how to do something, you have the concept, you just need help with a few details. That's why Unix tutorials suck, you learn by doing, one baby step at a time with someone providing 10 second long answers or helpful hints...when you're ready to hear it.
Now with linux, the newbie has to learn all this from manuals written for the wrong culture. I know...it's maddening.
For example, I don't want to understand how key presses flow into the OS, X and applications. My Linux box is constantly inconsistant in how it handles backspace and delete. Someone out there knows how to fix my box and I want them to tell me what to do in 10 seconds. I don't want to become an expert at that stuff, life's too short.
Another example, I want my IP masq firewall box to fetch mail in the middle of the night from the ISP and hold it for my W98 machines to pick it up fast via the home ethernet. I'm not at all stupid and have spent considerable time reading sendmail and fetchmail documentation, some O'Reilly books, etc. I'm not yet ready to memorize.conf file formats that the doc's repeatedly describe. What I want is a few block diagrams describing the concept of mail moving around the net. But, the culture assumes I got that from the guy next to me in the terminal room and besides it hard drawing ascii art in man pages.
I could write a whole chapter for the "I hate Unix" book...in an attempt to be constructive of course.
Slashdot Mirror
The author discussed motion blur in the real world and that the eye was designed for the real world. But didn't discuss computer generated imagery, which doesn't generally have motion blur (yet), and the benefits of high update rate. The eye, retina, visual cortex system has extensive special purpose motion processing systems, only poorly understood so far. The eye system is highly optimized for processing motion and using the blur on the retina as part of the interpretation of motion.
On the other hand, many display devices generate pulses of light that do not create blur on the retina under motion, either object motion or head/eye motion. This pulsed train impressed on the retina fools the eye system motion sensors.
The most common way to see this is to look at an LED clock or other LED display in a dim room. Ever notice that as you move your head, the display appears to swim in space? That's because the pulses of light from the scanned LED's create a sequence of still images on the retina while the surround creates a continuous blurred images. The two scenes get processed for motion differently and so appear to swim with respect to each other. This same effect occurs with CRT's in similar conditions.
Increase the refresh rate, and the pulsed light images get closer together and better approximate motion blur.
Note that this effect has nothing to do with flicker sensitivity or flicker fusion frequency.
I have no idea how Quake performance differs between 70 and 200 Hz refresh but I can see that it might.
see above.
Click to go to the home page of some software package and freshmeat puts up a "You will now be redirected to URL..." page.
What data does freshmeat gather??? At least they tell you.
Several factors combined to kill it for now.
1. lots of marketing claims on performance and availablity that didn't hold up
2. not very robust, certain images creates visible artifacts. The algorithm needed more work and less marketing
3. highly proprietary implementation prevented more people from playing with it or improving it.
4. complex and difficult mathematics not taught very many places limited the ability to incorporate into custom hardware
5. did I mention the heavy BS factor?
You're either naive, joking, or trolling. Organizations in power attempt to increase their power and decrease instances on imperfect control. Their limits come from law, lack of information, and resistance. The Net has increased the amount of information available, The laws clearly haven't responded to the rapidly changing technology. We're left with resistance.
Assuming US democracy works, and it has in the past, once a few fat cat kids get in trouble or a few sympathetic people get creamed by the new corporate power grabbers, the public will get outraged and polititans will explain how they've _always_ supported free this and that. But, it's possible that other forms of resistance will become necessary. Certainly, preserving the right to hold private conversations and the right to publish anonymously becomes essential to resisting the natural tendancy of power to attempt to increase it's hold.
The entire principle of government rests on balancing power and interests. How did you ever get the idea that yeilding all power results in a stable situation?
1. Recent studies show that electric fields might cause problems but probably not magnetic fields. The effect probably comes from static buildup creating new molecules that poison us rather than directly from the field. As an aside, _don't_ use a monitor that crackles when you put your hand on the face, because it tears apart the various plastic and cleaning fluid vapor molecules and creates all kind of junk.
2. No one needs a lead jock strap bacause the only claimed effect is cancer statistics not sterility.
3.Not all radiation is the same by about 10^30
5. Lead has nothing to do with magnetism...lead's for particles and gamma rays. Shield magnetic fields with Mu metal. It's soft iron or nickel, kind of looks like thick tin foil
6. We had the flicker problem in a old 1860's textile mill building I worked in, lots of bad wiring. Solution, simply change the monitor scan rate to 60 Hz. Some people will perceive flicker, try telling them they're imagining it. Dimming the lights and monitor brightness helps, because the eye has much better flicker sensitivity at high brightness.
Am I the only one that thinks the Guidescope thing is dangerous? They get a message about every site you hit. Do you really trust that their privacy policy as stated today will remain the same? Do you really want a central clearing house with records of your web history subject to subpoena in a lawsuit?
Junkbuster and most of the other suggestions here blocks the stuff you don't want at your own computer, without sending out any info.
Also, how does Guidescope intend to make money? Maybe the Opt-In thing will provide enough revenue because the database has more value to advertisers, but you have to visit their site again to get your ads.
The whole thing feels very strange. I suspect it's an advertising/marketing thing to lull users into a false sense of security.
If you can't host servers how can you host a personal web site?
The crypto world invented steganography in order to hide the use of crypto (It buries the data bits in a large audio or image file). It sounds like the IPsec people would find users if they provided a variant on freeswan that hid the setup and data packets.
VPN data packets just look like random data inside the IP packet. But maybe the firewall/router/anticompetitive device can look for the setup messages, or detect use of certain ports? This is sad. It used to be that worst case firewall's came from big company network security engineers. This is a whole new class of annoying. Now the world will need an undetectable vpn setup protocol.
VPN usually means creating an encrypted IP in IP tunnel, for example between home and office, to allow secure connections. So, we have a difference of interpretation here that hard to understand. cwilson assumes it means creating a home network, probably with ipmasquerading. But I've never seen "VPN" used in that context. On the other hand, what does it mean for @home to forbid encrypted tunnels. Do they mean you can't encrypt? What about SSL? Do they mean you can't create a site that allows others to VPN in from the internet? Mysterious.
E-beam lithography is what they used to create the mask. They they used anisotropic etching to further control channel size to less than lithographic feature size (a very common technique). Read up on the technology a bit. Maybe you're thinking of Ion Implant technology where the process actually implants the doping atoms without lithography?
Current generation fab plants cost about $6B to build with that increasing about 50% per generation of technology, which takes about 18 months. These fab plants currently use ultraviolet light to expose a whole IC in one step. What IBM is proposing will require drawing each feature with electron beams...a very time consuming process when an IC contains 300 million little lines...making an IC built with technology about 300M time more expensive than current UV lithography....suitable for special single transistors and research into quantum effects but Not Ready for Prime Time(tm). Eventually the industry will develop electron beam or x-ray resists to make IC's with this density but Moore's law holds both ways, as a predictor on advancement and as a predictor of limits on what's possible.
Timely topic...The Corel Linux words on the box turned OFF my office mate. He's just bought a new high end PC and is looking around for a Linux distro to install. He's hardware engineer, power NT usr, Unix in college, and according to him, "It's time." His impression was the words focused on Corel and not enough on what's in the box...too much on install tools and not enough on the list of software. He liked SuSe because it listed the key packages.
Actually, switching speed is becomming less and less important in chip design. Today's technology, 0.25 micron feature size and smaller has pushed line widths down and die size up to the point that it takes more than one clock cycle to move a signal from one side of the die to another...because the fine lines have a lot of resistance and silicon has a lot of capacitance. Which explains the push for copper interconnects (Intel's Coppermine CPU, and others), copper has less resistance than Aluminum.
This speed limit is so significant that it drives CPU architecture towards the Itanium (wide instruction word) and Transmeta Crusoe (software scheduling) and away from superscalar/multiscalar, all because it's to difficult too design hardware that coordinates pipeline stalls all over the die.
How in the world did this paranoid delusion (old term for troll) get Score: 2???? The facts are that commercial technology is moving faster than state sponsored technology...as you might imagine for anything run by bureaucrats.
For example, in the mid 80's, the Dept of Defense thought it needed to sponsor Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC). The initial briefings talked about achieving 25 MHz and calling all such chips "munitions" and forbidding their export as a threat to national security. But as usual for DoD projects that try to compete with commercial, Intel had 100 MHz Pentiums before VHSIC had much more than some toy bus interface chips. Pentiums easily met the munition standard.
The BLAST algorithm mentioned in the start of this thread does significantly better that dual polarized links. BLAST allows the transmitter power to drop in half when using two antennas (same _total_ power as number of antennas increase). Try this with separate dual polarized links, the S/N drops and the Shannon limit drops _exactly_ in half...resulting in the same net throughput. The magic of BLAST is that the data rate _grows_ linearly with number of antennas while keeping total power constant.
Shannon's formula _does_ exactly explain why 56K modems are the limit. Telco samples the phone line at 8 kHz and 8 bits per sample (64k bit rate). It's the fact that the analog line is quantized to 8 bits that determines the signal to noise ratio (about 6 dB per bit=48 dB). Given that amount of noise, no modem designer can invent a signaling structure that gets more bits per symbol. What you say is also true, given an optimum signaling structure...the digital trunks will only carry 64K less overhead.
Claude Shannon develop a relationship between capacity and bandwidth ("the Shannon Limit") that has held for 40-50 years. That's (mostly) why modems topped out at 56K.
But here's some brilliant work that supports 10X better for wireless links http://www.bell-labs.com/project/blast/
"Spacial Reuse" says that capacity is effectively unlimited. In other words, if you need more capacity, make the cell sizes smaller.
Why is this funny?
Lineo is a distribution with value added and customer support. I doubt that Transmeta want's to get into the Linux distribution business...after all even Linus doesn't do distributions, just kernels. Mobile linux is more of a feasibility demonstration/test platform/marketing warm and fuzzy for the processor...and a great test program for the processor.
Y'all have been talking about algorithms, math,etc. But a quick look at the guys page clearly shows the focus on design for VLSI implementation. He doesn't need to patent math ...he's patenting the circuit.
Yes, he deserves a patent
More and more of the economy now assumes a sustained exponential growth of IC based products. When the growth rate begins to slow, it WILL create significant disruption. A number of points: First the rate of growth WILL slow sometime, maybe caused by fundamental process limits, maybe by increasing costs associated with the capital equipment to manufacture the stuff, or maybe because it becomes to large a percentage of the GNP (saturation).
IC manufacture is capital intensive. Someone told me that an Intel fab plant runs $5-8B today and doubles every generation. Wall Street is pumping money into Silicon because of growth. When growth slows or stops is will have an enormous impact on investment flow. Then the lack of investment will slow progress, slowing the need for development. It's all interrelated, coupled and highly amplified by the exponent of Moore's Law.
When it slows, the whole attitude about products will shift. Today, if you want a really good sewing machine or small lathe you get a good used one built 1930-1950. When Moore's law times out, the investment in plants will slow to a trickle. Fab equipment will wear out. Student will avoid the dying industry. (What's the Silicon version of rust belt?) People won't buy a new computer because it's not as good as the old one. Software development will begin to focus on quality and then crash as the market saturates (no need to buy new SW once it works and you have to run on the same old machine.
When today's Moore's law based economy crashes it will create massive dislocations. Imagine Silicon Valley with a New England mill town look, or Pittsburg/Buffalo/Cleveland circa 1970.
When the Unix culture formed, it consisted of a bunch of terminals in a room. When you had a question, somebody in the room had just a bit more experience (20 minutes is enough) and could help. I'm old enough to remember the culture.
.conf file formats that the doc's repeatedly describe. What I want is a few block diagrams describing the concept of mail moving around the net. But, the culture assumes I got that from the guy next to me in the terminal room and besides it hard drawing ascii art in man pages.
That's why man pages exist in the form they do. Someone told you how to do something, you have the concept, you just need help with a few details. That's why Unix tutorials suck, you learn by doing, one baby step at a time with someone providing 10 second long answers or helpful hints...when you're ready to hear it.
Now with linux, the newbie has to learn all this from manuals written for the wrong culture. I know...it's maddening.
For example, I don't want to understand how key presses flow into the OS, X and applications. My Linux box is constantly inconsistant in how it handles backspace and delete. Someone out there knows how to fix my box and I want them to tell me what to do in 10 seconds. I don't want to become an expert at that stuff, life's too short.
Another example, I want my IP masq firewall box to fetch mail in the middle of the night from the ISP and hold it for my W98 machines to pick it up fast via the home ethernet. I'm not at all stupid and have spent considerable time reading sendmail and fetchmail documentation, some O'Reilly books, etc. I'm not yet ready to memorize
I could write a whole chapter for the "I hate Unix" book...in an attempt to be constructive of course.